2D Animation Sequence

2D Animation

The assignment brief was to create a 15-20 seconds animation sequence using Adobe Flash.

There are many different ways to make an animation in Flash. You could use a classic tween, a motion tween, or maybe even just frame by frame. As a child, I used to do silly flick-book animations on paper, so I decided to go for a frame by frame animation, which included doing 24 individual drawings per second.

The initial idea behind the animation was to create something slightly odd and captivating, or maybe an illusion of some sort. I was also inspired after watching a piece created by Norman Mclaren in 1940. I loved the arty, abstract vibe and I wanted to create something that looked similar, but by putting my own spin on it. Here is that video:

I used the brush tool for the majority of the drawings and then I would fill in the shapes using the paint bucket. The overall task seemed easy, yet sometimes slow and monotonous as I would be drawing the exact same thing with only subtle changes over and over. The slight changes in the images creates the illusion of movement.

When I was satisfied with the animation, I exported it as a .mov, which compressed the animation and made it a video. I then imported that into Adobe Premiere Pro, where I could add audio and credits if I wanted to.

I used the website www.freesfx.com to gather all the possible sound effects that I may want to use. I kept the website open in a window incase I decided to come back and add more into the animation. Once all of the sounds were downloaded to my computer, I imported them into Premiere Pro and began fitting them with the appropriate part of animation. I could use this program to overlap the sounds and from this, I could build up tension.

I decided to then reverse the whole animation and play it backwards after the original to create a longer piece and decided to add more sound.

Here are the steps I took to create the 2D animation:

I began by obviously creating a new project on Adobe Flash CS6. I then set the stage size and was ready to begin animating.

I wanted to create the animation using a frame by frame technique, so I started the animating by inserting a blank keyframe, which I would have to repeat before every drawing.

The red line allows you to select which frame is being viewed on the stage. If a frame is clicked on, then that frame of the animation can be edited on the stage.

The layers allow you to create literally, multiple layers of animation at one time. I used the layer capability to make my stage completely black.

The stage is the black square, just above the timeline.  This is where the animation is shown, as seen on the screenshot below. This was one frame from my animation. I used the paint brush tool to draw the outline and then I used the paint bucket tool to fill it in.

The animation process was very tedious and took an extremely long time, considering that there were 24 frames to draw for one second of animation on video. There was a really useful tool that the program had included in it. It was the 'union skin' capability, which allowed me to see a faded version of the previous frame of animation. This meant that I could create a cleaner looking animation and more accurate.

This image shows the onion skin icon in the left.

This image shows how the stage looks when the onion skin is enabled.

I thought this was an interesting piece of animation to attempt. It was animated to make it look like the 'camera' was going towards the tunnel and between the sky scrapers. I know I didn't pull it off perfectly, but I think it was a relatively good first attempt since I'd never animated before.

Once the animation was completed and I was happy with it, I exported it as a .mov file. I then imported the file into Adobe Premiere pro, where I could add sound and visual effects. I wanted to create an animation with an artsy, abstract feel to it and I had a pretty good vision in my head of what I wanted.

I went onto a website where I knew I could get sound effects for free, which was freesfx.co.uk. I spend a long amount of time searching through music of certain genres and selected a few tracks I thought would fit my idea suitably. I then imported the sound effects and began experimenting with where to put them in the animation, just a bit of trial and error to get the correct positioning for the sound effects.

When all the sound effects were in place, I decided to reverse the whole animation and put it after the original with a different sound effect to add something else to the video, not just for the sake of extending the time.

I took an artistic decision to not add titles to the animation, as I thought it would have taken away from the abstract feeling. However, if I was to add titles, I know how to do them as I have added them to many other videos I have done in the past.

Here is the final video, which I uploaded to YouTube for the purpose of this blog. Enjoy!